Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies For Dummies

By Christopher Hodapp and Alice Von Kannon

What do Skull and Bones, the Kennedys, and UFOs all have in common? They’re all shrouded in mystery and conspiracies

Entering the world of conspiracy theories and secret societies is like stepping into a distant, parallel universe where the laws of physics don't apply and everything you know is wrong: black is white, up is down. If you want to understand what's really going on — from fluoridated water and chemtrails to alien autopsies, free electricity, and more — you need a good reference book, and that's where Conspiracy Theories & Secret Societies For Dummies comes in.

Whether you're a skeptic or a true believer, this fascinating guide, packed with the latest information, walks you through some of the most infamous conspiracy theories — such as Area 51, the assassination of JFK, and reptilian humanoids — and introduces you to such mysterious organizations as the Freemasons, the Ninjas, the Illuminati, the Mafia, and Rosicrucians. This behind-the-curtain guide helps you separate fact from fiction and provides insight into the global impact these mysterious events and groups have had on our modern world. Discover how to:

• Test a conspiracy theory
• Spot a sinister secret society
• Assess the Internet's role in fueling conspiracy theories
• Explore world domination schemes
• Evaluate 9/11 conspiracy theories
• Figure out who "they" are
• Grasp the model on which conspiracy theories are built
• Figure out whether what "everybody knows" is true
• Distinguish one assassination brotherhood from another
• Understand why there’s no such thing as a "lone assassin"

Additionally, you can read about some conspiracy theories that turned out to be true (like the CIA's LSD experiments), theories that seem beyond the pale (such as the deliberate destruction of the space shuttle Columbia), and truly weird secret societies (Worshippers of the Onion and nine more). Grab your own copy of Conspiracy Theories & Secret Societies For Dummies and decide for yourself what is fact and what is a conspiracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Feb 4, 2011
• ISBN: 9781118052020

Book preview

Part I

Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies: The Improbable Wedded to the Inscrutable

In this part . . .

About 99.9 percent of all respectable conspiracy theories are tied hand and foot to some sort of secret society or organization. This secret society or organization is the they, as in "they hid the wrecked alien spacecraft in Roswell in 1947. This section lays out easy-to-understand models, with no cryptic double talk, about all the theys" out there, and all the dark conspiracies behind them.

Chapter 1

Everything You Know Is Wrong

In This Chapter

bullet Believing the unbelievable: The age of conspiracy theories and secret societies

bullet Figuring out what’s worth believing

bullet Touring the world, one conspiracy at a time

Journalist H. L. Mencken once said, The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

A conspiracy theory is the idea that someone, or a group of someones, acts secretly, with the goal of achieving power, wealth, influence, or other benefit. It can be as small as two petty thugs conspiring to stickup a liquor store, or as big as a group of revolutionaries conspiring to take over their country’s government. Individuals, corporations, churches, politicians, military leaders, and entire governments can all be conspirators, in plots as evil as secretly developing nuclear weapons, as creepy as smuggling stolen human transplant organs, or as annoying as cornering the market on neighborhood $4-coffee joints.

The conspiracy theory is absolutely inseparable from the secret society. They go together like Minneapolis and St. Paul. Face it: Everyone hates secrets. You didn’t like it when the kids kept secrets from you in gym class, and you’ve never gotten over it. Neither have we.

Secret societies are the repositories of the hidden knowledge that spins the conspiracy theory. But the term secret society covers a lot of ground — everything from college fraternities and the lodge your grandpa belonged to, to the lesser known, powerful groups that stay out of the eyes of the press, like the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the legendary Illuminati (if they really exist at all).

This chapter begins the process of teaching you how to tell the truth from the manure, at least where conspiracy theories and secret societies are concerned. Throughout this book, we also set out to simplify what at least sounds staggeringly confusing. We clarify conspiracy theories that are coming at you from all sides nowadays on everything from the Mafia running the Vatican to aliens landing in New Mexico (or is it the aliens in the Vatican and the Mafia in New Jersey?). Consider this chapter your warm-up exercise!

Living in the Age of Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies

The popularity of the conspiracy theory as a way of explaining society and world events is a pretty recent phenomena, a product of the time since the French Revolution of 1789, which was the first real marriage of paranoia and the printing press. But it’s just within the last 40 years that the philosophy of conspiracism has become like a wall of noise, an assault on the collective consciousness, and the most common way to explain complex world events. In many respects, conspiracies are a way of simplifying history into good and bad, right and wrong.

A conspiracy theory is a way of looking at a single event and postulating that maybe there’s a lot more to it than can be seen on the surface, with darker forces behind the whole thing. Conspiracism expands on this, becoming an entire philosophy, as a way of viewing the world. For the professional conspiracist, a person who studies the conspiracies, there isn’t much going on in the world that doesn’t have darker forces behind it, from the price of a gallon of gasoline to the three ounces of hand lotion you can’t ever seem to extract from the bottom of a 16-ounce bottle. Of course, in a way, even the term conspiracism is too respectable to apply to much of what is floating around the Internet and the tabloids these days. Since the middle of the last century, academic, postmodernist researchers have found it fashionable to refer to all psychological states and moods in German. It’s a Sigmund Freud thing. Author Thom Burnett in the Conspiracy Encyclopedia (2005, Chamberlain Bros.) points out that the Germans have a great term, Verschworungsmythos, which means Conspiracy Myth, and in many ways, it has lots to recommend it as a descriptive label.

Perhaps the conspiracy world is an updated version of ancient myths, Burnett says, where monsters and the gods of Olympus and Valhalla have been replaced by aliens and the Illuminati of Washington and Buckingham Palace. In other words, the new wave of jitters over conspiracies and secret societies has beaten up the zeitgeist with their weltschmerz over weltpolitik (the spirit of our times has had the crap kicked out of it by anxiety over global domination). See, we can do the German thing too. Gesundheit.

What makes the study of conspiracy theories and secret societies unusual is, when boiled down to their most common elements, the overwhelming majority have grown or been adapted from the same few original sources. Historian Daniel Pipes has said that almost all conspiracy theories have as their origin the same two boogeymen — Jews and secret societies, most notably the Freemasons. They have simply been recycled and renamed, again and again, as events have transpired over the last 250 years.

For example, if you take almost any conspiracy about the Jews from the 19th century, and erase Jews and substitute military-industrial complex or neocons, you find that very same theory in dozens of books and on hundreds of Web sites about the sinister forces behind the 9/11 conspiracy. In many ways, it shows a criminal lack of originality. On the other hand, conspiracists would claim, plots around the world and the evildoers who engage in them haven’t changed much over the centuries. They’ve only gotten more ambitious.

What’s Worth Scrutinizing, and What’s Not

Between books, the Internet, and cable television, the average American comes into contact with a lot of ideas that are no longer sifted through established media. A bigger and bigger chunk of these ideas challenges the status quo — the beliefs of stodgy academics and of society in general. Such thoughts also assert that organizations, from the government to the Illuminati (see Chapter 11), are in cahoots to make sure that no one yet knows the truth. But just because an appealing idea comes from the "alternative’ media instead of the mouths of TV anchors or White House spokesmen doesn’t always make it true.

As professional conspiracists write book after book, raking in the money faster than they can count it, most care very little about the confusion and fear they leave behind. Internet Web-meisters who peddle this stuff care even less. But we care about it, a lot. Don’t fear — you can acquire the skills you need to digest it all and discern the information. In Chapter 2, in particular, we help you decide between information that’s worth paying attention to and information you should ignore, and why.

Connecting the dots

There’s a very important point about exploring conspiracy theories. It is not enough to just lay out facts or events, like dots on a page, and scream aha! at the mere fact, for example, that over 100 people involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy are dead. Involved often meaning as little as they were standing in the crowd in Dallas. It’s been almost 40 years, and of the thousands of people peripherally involved in the case, it’s not a big shock for more than 100 of them to have died. Now, if 75 of them had been wrapped in plastic and duct tape and dumped into a Dallas reservoir, you might have something.

The point we are making is that a box full of random dots is meaningless. To be a true theory worth considering, the dots have to be connected. And to be taken seriously, a conspiracy theory has to connect those dots convincingly and with some irrefutable proof.

Benjamin Franklin once said, Three may keep a secret when two are dead. When you’re confronted by a conspiracy that requires the military or the government or literally thousands of covert insiders around the world to keep a Very Big Secret for tens, or hundreds, of years, and just one lone courageous warrior steps forward with an outlandish tale that no one else backs up, it’s time to turn on your alarm system again. Courage could be vanity, and honesty merely accusation or sour grapes or revenge.

What is proof?

Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865. Since about 24 hours afterwards, the world has been trying to find out the details about the conspiracy behind it. (And there was a conspiracy — for more on that, see Chapter 5.) Interest in the plot has come and gone over the years, most recently in the 2007 film National Treasure II: The Book of Secrets, which prominently featured the discovery of the missing pages of assassin John Wilkes Booth’s diary. And there really are missing pages — historians just aren’t sure why.

One of the hundreds of books we consulted during this project was a bit nostalgic —The Lincoln Conspiracy (Schick Sun Classic Books) by David Balsiger and Charles E. Sellier. (This book was parent to the Sunn Classics film of the same name that did remarkably well in theaters in 1977.)

Like most conspiracy books, The Lincoln Conspiracy has many footnotes and an impressively long bibliography. But, also like most conspiracy literature, it’s a circular citing process, with conspiracists endlessly referring to one another’s work (see Chapter 2 for more on this phenomenon). Despite their abundant cribbing from an earlier conspiracist work from the 1930s by an Austrian chemist named Otto Eisenschiml, the authors claimed to be the only investigators in history who’d ever gotten the story of Lincoln’s assassination right. They also seemed to have connected with an amazing number of documents to back up their version of events, papers, and diaries that had slipped past mere mortal historians.

The book’s opening pages were touting these various miraculous discoveries, as well as the severe scientific methodology they had put to use in their quest. They claimed this was especially true of their discovery of the missing pages of Booth’s diary, a set of documents worth up to $1 million dollars. Wow! But when you read on carefully, you come across the following astonishing statement:

The authors acquired a full transcript of the contents of the missing pages and had the contents evaluated by historical experts, but have not been able to acquire copies of the actual pages to authenticate the handwriting.

What these guys are saying is that they haven’t even seen copies of the actual million dollar diary pages on which they’ve built just about the entire thesis of their book. It is this typical amateur detective work, backed up with hearsay, innuendo, and rumor that makes so many conspiracists so hard to take seriously.

Being skeptical about speculative thinking

Most theories, from the Kennedy assassination to Jesus-having-a-wife books, share the title of alternative histories, or speculative works. The word speculative is the key point here. Because once people start speculating, it becomes your job, to a great degree, to speculate, as well.

For example, in the mental gymnastics of the folks who love to tell you that ancient space aliens were responsible for the Egyptian Sphinx, or that the huge carvings called the Nazca Lines in Peru had to have been done by someone able to fly over the countryside, there’s just a wisp of contempt for that most amazing of all tools, the human mind. There’s an attitude that ancient man was just too, well, primitive (for primitive, read stupid) to have been able to build something on that scale.

The same sort of speculative thinking goes into more modern creations, like crop circles (see Chapter 7). Admittedly, many crop circles are astonishing as well as dramatic. But are they the watermarks of alien spaceships or superior extraterrestrial technology? All that’s required to make a crop circle is a two-by-four and a rudimentary understanding of mathematics and geometry. Just as we were writing this chapter, a crop circle was discovered in New Jersey in the shape of a swastika. Somehow we doubt it was a message left to us from visitors from Alpha Centauri.

The Conspiracism World Tour

Where conspiracy theories are concerned, there’s nothing particularly weird about our own time when you take a look back at history. Consider, for example, these items from the early years of U.S. history:

bullet George Washington, a Freemason, was edgy about the possible infiltration of the Illuminati (see Chapter 11) during his presidency.

bullet Many people believed Thomas Jefferson was secretly a member of the Illuminati.

bullet After killing former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton in a duel, Vice President Aaron Burr really did hatch a conspiracy to wrestle control of the western territories away from the U.S. so he could be king of a new empire in the West (see Chapter 17).

bullet Economists and people nervous about financial dealings on a global scale have been shoveling grim and prophetic jeremiads about the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank, since its very creation, as being a hotbed of chicanery controlled by capitalist titans.

bullet The assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Chapter 5) resulted in a nationwide search for conspirators, both real and imagined, a lot of whom were hanged.

But, while there have been conspiracists throughout history, the 20th century seems to have been the biggest incubator for them. As we show you in the next sections, the 20th century was a particularly intense period that led to clammy hands over secret societies, coverups, and intrigues.

The birth of 20th-century U.S. conspiracism

During World War II, the U.S. government routinely hid secret missions and programs (along with military failures) as part of the war effort. It was vital to keep the national mood focused on winning. And the general belief of Americans was that government secrecy was a good thing: Loose lips sink ships. Secrecy was patriotic. The government and the military were supposed to be keeping secrets.

After the war, the U.S. engaged in a nuclear stare-down with the Soviets, who were devouring countries all over Eastern Europe and had sworn to get around to us eventually. The stakes were very high.

Most Americans don’t know how close the U.S. came to getting nuked by the Axis powers during WWII, when a sub with a dirty nuclear bomb, a joint German-Japanese endeavor, was literally on its way to San Francisco when the war ended. Then, less than five years after the explosion of the atomic bombs over Japan, Soviet scientists had their own full-blown nuclear bombs, and much of the technology had been stolen from U.S. laboratories and developed in Russia by former Nazi scientists.

While the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the bombastic Senator Joe McCarthy made headlines in the 1950s peering under the sheets for Commies in Hollywood, ferreting out the deep political thoughts of Gary Cooper, the truth was that there really were Communist agents across the United States, funding subversive anti-American groups, spying on military and scientific installations, and infiltrating U.S. intelligence organizations like the CIA.

The Communist Party of the United States was no independent organization of starry-eyed idealists. By the 1970s they were receiving $3 million a year from the Soviet Union and had aided the Soviet Secret Police (KGB) throughout the 1940s and ’50s in recruiting spies.

High-profile spying trials, such as the trials of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss (who were, in spite of claims to the contrary, all guilty of Soviet espionage), kept Americans looking outward for conspiracies. But that was about to change, drastically, and the threat to our way of life suddenly seemed to be from within.

JFK on secrecy

One of the most commonly printed quotes about secrecy and secret societies in the U.S. was made by President John F. Kennedy in 1961. It is frequently used by conspiracists to show that Americans distrust secret societies:

The very word secrecy is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings.

Of course, like any sound bite, the part that gets left out is that Kennedy was actually giving a Cold War–era speech in favor of secrecy. He was asking a ballroom filled with newspaper publishers to keep their mouths shut about U.S. government activities and to not print anything in their papers that might give our enemies an advantage. On the one hand, he blasted the Soviet Union for controlling its press with an iron hand. On the other hand, he sounded pretty envious of their power to do it.

The psychedelic ’70s: Conspiracism peaks

To understand the explosion of conspiracism that has happened over the last four decades, you need to understand just a little of why the 1970s were the turning point.

While famous conspiracies were alleged in the deaths of Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s, most sociologists hang the modern growth and acceptance of conspiracy theories on the Vietnam War era and the Watergate-related events under President Richard Nixon. The government was starting to get caught engaging in old-fashioned, WWII-type secrecy to cover up military blunders in Cuba under President Kennedy and in Vietnam under President Lyndon Johnson.

Distrust peaked during the second term of Richard Nixon, stoked by his own infamous antagonism over the press and what he regarded as subversive elements.

The Pentagon Papers

In 1971, The New York Times published a stack of reports leaked from the Defense Department, famously known as The Pentagon Papers. The top-secret reports were written in 1967 and outlined how the Johnson administration secretly expanded the Vietnam War, while lying to the public and pretending to seek strategic advice from diplomats, as well as engaging in false flag operations — staged raids supposedly from the Viet Cong.

The revelations came three years after Johnson had left office, but they helped turn the tide of public opinion against the war. This bitterness only worsened under his successor, Richard Nixon.

None dare call it conspiracy

Gary Allen and Larry Abraham’s 1971 book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy, was a watermark for conspiracy literature. Closely associated with the right-wing John Birch Society, they trace world events, from the Russian Revolution up through the Nixon administration and purport that history has been controlled by an elite cabal of international bankers.

This was the book that put the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderbergers on the conspiracists’ map (see Chapter 15). All the suspects that have dominated the genre ever since were collected in this book — the Illuminati, the Freemasons, Jewish bankers, Cecil Rhodes, and the Rockefellers. It also raises the alarm over the printing of worthless paper money, fears over gun control, and puppet presidential candidates who are the willing stooges of the New World Order regardless of party affiliation.

In search of . . . conspiracies

After the Watergate scandals erupted in 1973, the general consensus of a once-trusting American public changed, drastically. The nation had seen their president spying on the opposition party and lying about it, and the military engaging in maneuvering war to their own ends. The vice president and the attorney general had been proven to be liars and crooks. The Vietnam War limped to an end, and U.S. troops were pulled out without achieving victory — the first loss of a war in American history. Suddenly, and sadly, the Leave It To Beaver TV universe of only 15 years before seemed absurd to a newly cynical nation.

Influenced by this almost universal sense of suspicion, the 1970s saw an explosion of books, movies, and TV shows about conspiracies. The first books about the purported UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1946 appeared in the mid-1970s (see Chapter 7), 30 years after the fact. The filmmakers at Sunn Classic Pictures were raking it in with over a dozen conspiracist films in that decade.

Even television got into the act, and the series In Search Of . . . covered similar topics, narrated by the most trusted, logical, and world-famous scientist of our time, Star Trek’s Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy). It was the generation that grew up with these influences that went on to create shows like The X-Files in the 1990s and to fashion for conspiracism an aura of brave and indefatigable truth in the face of powerful, dangerous enemies.

Conspiracy theories aren’t limited to the USA!

America doesn’t have the corner on the paranoia market when it comes to distrust of secret groups and the creation of conspiracy theories. Take a taste off the international menu:

bullet Canada has its own Roswell (see Chapter 7), called Shag Harbor.

bullet Israel has its own Kennedy assassination (see Chapter 5) in the killing of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

bullet The British believe that everyone from Princess Diana to UN weapons inspector David Kelly was murdered by the government.

bullet The Italians have their own Bilderbergers (see Chapter 15) in their Club of Rome.

bullet The French believe that the Freemasons (see Chapter 9) are behind everything.

bullet Throughout Central Asia and in parts of South America it is commonly believed that children are stolen from orphanages to harvest their internal organs for sale to the highest bidders in a bizarre medical black market. Variations of the tale in India claim thousands of stolen human kidneys are shipped each year to rich patients in the Middle East.

bullet In some Islamic nations, conspiracy theories about Jews poisoning kids’ bubble gum or tainting vaccines get printed on the front page of major metropolitan newspapers (see Chapter 6).

Such nervousness does seem to flourish best in democracies and free societies. Tyrants, fascist dictatorships, and totalitarian regimes lock down all information sources because they really are controlled by internal conspiracies and secret government agencies.

Writer Christopher Hitchens calls conspiracy theories the exhaust fumes of democracy, and that’s as good a phrase as any. It’s the bad part of the free use of information, and that’s the abuse of information.

A Word About Skepticism

There’s an old bit of bumper sticker philosophy that says just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. In a post-9/11 world, conspiracies don’t seem to be so far-fetched anymore. This real-life conspiracy played itself out on our TV screens. The result was the death of thousands of innocent civilians, and in the aftermath, everyone saw terrorist madman Osama Bin Laden take credit for it and the evidence unfold of the planning by his suicidal henchmen.

Then the conspiracy theorists stepped in and told everyone not to believe the evidence or common sense. The 9/11 conspiracy books started to come out, and dark hints of conspiracy showed up on various TV and radio commentaries. Somehow, right under our noses, the entire tone of the debate had changed.

In the world of the conspiracy theorist, loose bands of like-minded terrorists like Al-Qaeda can’t possibly be smart enough, rich enough, devious enough, organized enough, or big enough to pull off such an attack, right? Besides, who’s Al-Qaeda, anyway? No one had ever heard of them.

Many people thought someone else must be behind the 9/11 attacks, someone in the wings, someone bigger, someone pulling the strings as part of a vast, worldwide plan for global control. So, according to the conspiracy theorists, why waste the most dramatic event of the century on a bunch of terrorists armed with 89-cent box cutters or on their handlers hiding out in a cave half a world away? It had to have really been the CIA. Or the president. Or the military-industrial complex. Or the Freemasons. Or the reptilian aliens of the ancient Babylonian Bloodline. . . .

Of course, there really are conspiracies out there. It’s just human nature, the same human nature Chapter 3 discusses, that yearns to form secret societies. It’s also human nature that some bully boy in Iraq, some artist in Vienna, or some revolutionary in Chile believes that he was destined to rule the biggest chunk of the world he can lay his hands on, or at least enthrall masses of adoring followers. In the hands of a dictator, conspiracies are great for blinding people while you grab power. It’s like pointing and shouting, "Look over there!" while you steal all the poker chips. Yet, all the real conspiracies in the world may not have the potential for damage to culture that lies in believing that everything is a conspiracy. It’s not a healthy world view.

Chapter 2

Conspiracism and the Origin of Modern Conspiracy Theories

In This Chapter

bullet Discovering the world of conspiracy

bullet Figuring out conspiratorial names

bullet Classifying conspiracy types

bullet Detecting the lies in theories

In London’s Hyde Park, there’s a place called Speaker’s Corner, where anyone can preach or shriek anything they like, as long as they keep it clean. There have been some famous and brilliant people who’ve made speeches there, and there have been an awful lot of cranks, wackos, and madmen in the park, too. Aye, there’s the rub. How do you tell the difference between a cautionary reporter of impending calamity from a madman off his meds?

At one time, conspiracists, those who saw the dark hand of conspiracy in just about everything, were dressed in a white jacket that laced up the back with really, really long sleeves. Now, they have become respectable, even influential — or at least New York Times best-selling authors. There’s no doubt that, apart from simply being a facet of human nature, conspiracy theories rise and fall in volume along with national tension.

This chapter examines the anatomy of conspiracy theories and the history of the first conspiracy theories to really catch on in a big way, and it delves into the tactics used by half-baked conspiracists to lead you to a conclusion that just isn’t so. After reading this chapter, when some guy on TV tells you to just connect the dots, in order to sell you his book, you should be able to determine whether this gentleman has oatmeal where his brains should be.

Defining and Recognizing Conspiracism

Simply put, a conspiracy theory is the notion that someone, or an organized group of people, is acting secretly with evil intent. Police and courts often charge criminals with conspiracy to commit a crime — a bad guy or a group of his buddies meet and plan to commit theft, kidnapping, havoc, or mayhem against other citizens. Conspiracy is a crime in and of itself.

The word conspire comes from the Latin word, conspirare, which literally means to breathe together, and probably grew out of the idea of plotters whispering together — there were plenty of plots to go around in ancient Rome.

Boiled down to their simplest ingredients, conspiracy theories attempt to identify a struggle between good and evil, but on a much grander, and often worldwide, scale. Like bad guys in a James Bond movie, conspiracy theories can and often do go global and involve supercriminals, evil geniuses, megalomaniacal trillionaires, satanic demons, or even alien invaders who are hell-bent on owning everything or controlling everything or destroying everything (society, religion, economics, racial groups, or a combination of all of them).

Conspiracies are thought to exist so a small class or category of schemers can create a situation — politically, militarily, economically, or just through sheer snobbery — that works solely to serve their own self interests.

One small point on terminology before going any further: Many writers have written books about conspiracy theories, and for many of them, the very term conspiracy theory is a put-down, as is calling someone a conspiracy theorist. We don’t feel that way. Tinfoil hat-wearing moon bat is more our idea of a put-down. When we use the terms conspiracism or, when speaking of a single person, a conspiracist, we’re talking about people who claim to identify conspiracies. The terms themselves don’t imply whether we believe them or not.

Just what is conspiracism?

In the last two centuries, and particularly in the last 50 years or so, people the world over have embraced conspiracism. When we refer to a conspiracy, we mean an honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned conspiracy, as defined by the dictionary — a plot by some dark and nefarious characters to do something sinister or evil.

In its milder forms, conspiracism isn’t too bad. You know what we mean — the kind of guy who’s perfectly sane, yet he’s absolutely convinced that the price of everything he buys is controlled by some tiny cartel of bankers in New York or Geneva. Or maybe he thinks that the United Nations wants to take over the U.S. government. Or that National Security Agency spies are tracking his movements through a microchip in his neck inserted when he had his tonsils out.

The problem is that, as this sort of thinking has become more and more common, it’s spawned a new sort of social commentator and a new sort of world view, seeing every major world event through the dark filter of conspiracism.

The universe of conspiracism isn’t a random place where things happen for no reason. As Michael Barkun puts it in his book, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (University of California Press):

bullet Nothing happens by accident: Everything that happens in the world is intentional, by someone’s (or something’s) Grand Design.

bullet Nothing is as it seems: Whoever or whatever is in control disguises their role and their identity. In fact, they go out of their way to look innocent, deflect blame, or just plain hide.

bullet Everything is connected: Because of an intricate, evil design that allows for no accidents, there’s no such thing as a coincidence, and the patterns of evil forces are all interconnected with each other. Therefore, the right type of person can see these patterns of numbers, designs, events, or activities everywhere, once they know what to look for (see the sidebar Fnord).

This last bit is important, because in most conspiracy theories a thread of insistence exists that only certain, truly enlightened people can see the truth behind the secret plots. Most conspiracies are, so the thinking goes, invisible to the vast majority of sheeplike citizens who go grazing through the pasture of life, never suspecting the evil wolves lurking behind the rocks of everyday occurrences.

In a way, conspiracism can be comforting to true believers, because it removes the scary notion of randomness from the universe. For some, conspiracies can seem like an extension of religious faith, with God and Satan locked in a struggle for supremacy on Earth. In fact, many conspiracists are strongly connected to a belief in the coming of the end of the world. After a specific series of world events happens, these millenialists believe, those events will usher in Armageddon, the final battle between the forces of good and evil on earth (more on this in Chapter 6).

Conspiracism and secret societies

Something else that’s bound up hand and foot with conspiracism is, of course, the secret society. In fact, most of the popular conspiracy theories aren’t as new as you may think, and they can be traced back either to a fear of the Jews or a fear of secret societies. We go into more detail about generalities involving these groups in Chapter 3.

It’s important here to bring up secret societies’ role in the majority of conspiracy theories, because wherever there’s conspiracism, there’s always the fear of some tightknit group of theys who really know the score. These groups can be anyone — the World Bank, the Bilderbergers, the Freemasons (all of whom have their own sections in this book — see the index). These groups are the very breath of life to conspiracism, and the one can’t exist without the other.

Understanding How Conspiracists Think

In its most virulent forms, the fever of conspiracism can turn reality upside down. Dealing with the conspiracist, amateur or professional, is a lot like dealing with somebody who’s part of a religious cult. In fact, if you keep it up, they’ll probably accuse you of being part of the conspiracy.

A big part of the mindset of conspiracism is that all facts are malleable, all of them changeable in the right hands, none of them to be trusted. Like the cult member, conspiracists believe what they believe because they believe it, and they don’t like to be challenged. In fact, challenges to this sort of thinking tend to bring out the worst in the conspiracist, which is why there’s so little difference between a conspiracist and someone who’s just plain paranoid.

To the conspiracy theorist, the world is locked in a battle between a good Us and a bad Them, whoever They happen to be. The battle may be spiritual, physical, economic, or philosophical — or a combination of all of them. The worst part is, Them is often portrayed as a small group, a tight group, who really knows what’s going on, and Us takes the part of a herd of mindless cattle, being manipulated and too stupid to know they’re being duped. Being a conspiracist doesn’t require a love of mankind. In fact, the position is made to order for people who hate or mistrust humankind (called misanthropes).

As Daniel Pipes points out in his book Conspiracy, someone who indulges in conspiracism doesn’t necessarily go off the deep end, but it happens often enough to give one pause. Question reality often enough, and you have no sense of it left at all. This loss of reality, combined with mild to severe paranoia, can make you see enemies everywhere. British conspiracist and anti-Semite Nesta Webster took a gun with her every time she answered the door; Joseph Stalin, by the end of his days in absolute power, had people shot just for looking at him the wrong way.

Oliver Stone, director of the 1991 film JFK (see Chapter 5), once said, Paranoids have the facts. But he also said, Who owns reality? Who owns your mind? I’ve come to have severe doubts about Columbus, about Washington, about the Civil War being fought over slavery, about World War I, about World War II and the supposed fight against Nazism and Japanese control of resources . . . I don’t even know if I was born or who my parents were.

Shall we dance to the left or the right?

Conspiracists cross the political spectrum, and, in the process, sort of create their own party. In other words, from Holocaust deniers to Oliver Stone, they have the same process in their thinking. Now, Holocaust deniers tend to be right-wing and anti-Semitic, and would probably be deeply offended to be told they had anything at all in common with left-wing Hollywood director Stone. Yet, in the paranoid pattern of their thinking, they’re one and the same.

Hates are justifiable and grudges eternal, evil embodied by anyone who denies the shining light of the truth they hold. For conspiracists, conspiracies are behind most of history’s major events, even conspiracies involving so many people that they could fill the Seattle Kingdome. This, combined with an absolute allergic reaction to facts, is a dangerous combination. They trust no one apart from fellow travelers, and little enough in them.

Lack of proof is the proof

For the conspiracist, evidence is the hobgoblin of little minds. Looking for evidence is an annoyance, because for the true believer, the lack of proof is the proof of the conspiracy itself.

Lack of evidence proves that powerful forces are seeing to it that evidence never sees the light of day. But if evidence does come to light and refutes the claims of a professional conspiracist, he can turn it around to his advantage.

Such evidence is simply more proof that the conspirators are frightened of the conspiracists and are working overtime to cover their tracks by creating plausible, but utterly false, data. After all, so the argument goes, these evil forces control the media, business, banks, universities, governments, and all-you-can-eat buffets; obviously, the real truth will never come out. They will invent and plant new evidence to make their accusers look discredited — or ridiculous — which is a waste of time, because they can do that all on their own.

What the behaviorists say

Psychologists, psychiatrists, and other people who study the pathology of conspiracy theorists have come up with a raft of behavior categories:

bullet Apophenia: This behavior looks at meaningless or unconnected images, numbers, words, or other data and finds patterns in them. It can be as harmless as gazing at clouds and seeing kittens or dragons or as bizarre as seeing shadows and craters in a picture from Mars and deciding that it’s a gigantic face carved by some Martian Leonardo DaVinci.

bullet Confirmation bias: This habit is the tendency to develop a preconceived notion, then make all evidence conform to it, or to simply ignore the contrary evidence altogether.

Political arguments between members of opposite parties often degenerate into this type of selective, uncritical bias, such as He’s a tax-and-spend liberal, or She’s a country-club Republican. Any evidence to the contrary, such as him cutting a tax or her doing volunteer work in an inner-city church, is deemed either a lie or a complete aberration, because nothing can be permitted to interfere with this one’s contention that all liberals love to tax and spend, or that one’s contention that all Republicans love restricted country clubs. For many folks out there, this kind of thinking can be very comforting.

bullet Cognitive dissonance: Cognition is simply a knowledge you possess or something you know or learn. Dissonance means any two things that create tension by conflicting with one another. Therefore, cognitive dissonance is a state of mind in which a person has two thoughts or beliefs that are at odds with one another.

Examining Types of Conspiracy Theories

The various types of conspiracy theories can be broken down by what the perpetrators are supposedly up to. Author Michael Barkun classifies these types as

bullet Event conspiracies: These conspiracies are supposedly responsible for a specific event or chain of events, such as the creation of AIDS and crack by the CIA to wipe out inner-city African-Americans, or the claims that a U.S. military missile shot down TWA flight 800, with a subsequent coverup. The conspiracy exists to accomplish one limited, specific, well-focused objective.

bullet Systemic conspiracies: These broad-based conspiracies have ambitious goals such as gaining the control of a country, a region of the world, or the entire world, for that matter. Or maybe just everybody’s money.

Naturally, to pull this off requires a massive organization, operating in secret, to infiltrate governments and institutions. These allegations regularly include the accusations that Jews control banks, the press, and Hollywood; Freemasons control governments and businesses; Catholics or Muslims want to take over all world religions; and, depending on who’s weaving the conspiracy theory, either communists or world industrialists are taking over everything else. Unless, of course, you believe that the aliens have trumped the humans, and are just raising everyone to harvest people for food and/or sexual playthings.

bullet Super conspiracies: This notion comes back to the concept that everything is connected in one, vast, worldwide, super-duper plan of many conspiracies, all contained inside each other, like little Russian nesting dolls. All the event and systemic conspiracies (see preceding bullets) are merely tiny pieces of a giant puzzle, and their perpetrators are just pawns being controlled by one, great, all-powerful supergenius of evil, who’s invisible to us all and completely secret.

In conspiracist literature, this category is often called The Grand Conspiracy. For lack of a better or simpler example, Satan comes to mind for many, especially Christians who believe the end of the world is coming soon.

Applying Ockham’s Razor

A maxim was devised by a 14th-century Franciscan friar named William of Ockham (or Occam, depending on who’s doing the spelling) that comes up a lot in discussing conspiracy theories. The Latin version is, Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate, which means Plurality ought never be posed without necessity. The more modern version is, Keep it simple, stupid.

Ockham’s Razor, when applied to a conspiracy theory, shaves away the really complex parts of the idea, just like a real razor does, and demonstrates that there’s way too much that has to be interconnected and work perfectly, every single moment of every single day, to keep the entire world from discovering this horrid plot. It’s just too complicated.

For example, it requires a complex, convoluted series of people, and of plans, to justify the belief that Princess Diana was killed by British agents, acting on orders from her royal ex-in-laws, who maneuvered her into a limousine, kept her from fastening her seatbelt, and arranged to have a series of motorcycles and cars goad her driver into rocketing down a Paris street at high speed and crashing into a concrete pylon, simply in order to hide the fact that she may have been pregnant by her Egyptian lover.

Ockham’s Razor applied to the Princess Diana situation bears a more likely scenario: that her driver was drunk and, as drunks often do, was driving too fast; that paparazzi on motorcycles were irresponsible jerks and clearly trying to make a dangerous photo-op out of the situation; that the experienced English Royal Family and their own security people were better at taking care of her than the al Fayad family no matter how rich they are; and that Paris motorists are maniacs, which all resulted in a tragic accident.

The French Revolution and the Birth of Modern Conspiracism

Conspiracy theories appeal to something deep inside the human animal. In that respect, they’re as old as man. For example, the chronicler William of Tyre made dark assertions about the behind-the-scenes power of the Knights Templar ten centuries ago. Yet the fact is that modern conspiracism, as experienced today, wasn’t born; it was made. It was cooked up in the lab, just like Frankenstein’s monster. And the laboratory was the French Revolution.

The French Revolution? Yes, it does sound as though we’re taking a drunken loop off the beaten path. But it’s necessary to understand a few of the uglier events of the French Revolution in order to understand the forces that sewed together the Frankenstein of conspiracism. The revolution was unlike anything that had come before, shaking civilization to the core. It destroyed the old society and the old culture overnight, replacing it with a completely new one, including a new religion, new forms of address, new forms of government, even new fashions and behaviors that were permissible in public, while the old ones were banned.

Attitudes before the French Revolution

Western civilization, after the fall of Rome, was built on kings and their courts and their system of justice, as well as the basic feudal system of peasant, knight, lord, and king. Along with the arrival of learning, extended to one and all by the printing press, the seeds of change began with the growth of an economically healthy middle class in Europe, as early as the 1500s.

By the time of the revolt in France, in 1789, the middle class was doing well. The state was nearly bankrupt, and what money it had came from taxing this class. Naturally, an idea took root pretty quickly — If we’re the backbone of the nation, then how come we get treated as if we’re no different in social class from a peasant?

In this period, called the Enlightenment, the buzzwords were science and reason. Hot young philosophers were writing incredibly popular books that asked a lot of forbidden questions, especially, How come the church and the nobles get to run everything, yet pay for nothing? You’ll see the Enlightenment referred to throughout this book, because it was a period of cataclysmic change philosophically, scientifically, religiously, and socially. And groups that pop up in other chapters — the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and many others — were formed during the Enlightenment (roughly 1650 up through 1800).

This period led to tensions all over Europe, and even some violence, eventually creating a much better society. What it led to in France was the French Revolution. From 1789 until the rise

Reviews for Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies For Dummies

[minfo_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Having read all three of Chris' prior books and being a pretty active conspiracy scoffer, I'd girded my loins for a disappointment this time around. Just more Freemason conspiracy (Solomon's Builders) and more Templars conspiracy (Templar Code for Dummies) with a little lettuce thrown around on the edges to make it look fancy and different…. HARDLY!Whether it's organized crime, the Illuminati, or world domination, Chris and Alice take you down the dark alleys of mystery and fear but always keep a flashlight focused carefully so you won't get grabbed by the hobgoblins. Trying to put a coherent order to the 'weird things of the world' would be a daunting task for anyone but the authors start with a very plausible premise: it all began with the French Revolution. They frequently reach back to that touchstone as the net grows wider in explaining the bizarre and while you might not accept it at face value, you soon realize that the premise has LOTS of merit.In the basic areas of foolishness (such as the Hoaglund 'Face on Mars'), the authors are wryly dismissive but in the more controversial or confusing things there's a calm and deliberate presentation of facts and a laying out 'common knowledge' interspersed with 'the rest of the story' (i.e., the FACTS!). In few cases they do pull out the 'tin-foil hat' award but otherwise it's basic exposition with an admission that there's no answer when, in fact, there is none. There's no doe-like innocence to be found but neither is there overt criticism. It's reminiscent of Sergeant Friday: "Just the facts, ma'am." - but this time with some humor added.It's clear that Chris and Alice have read from the major skeptics before beginning and they regularly refer to specific (and qualified) debunkers. Apropos of the subject, the book cries out for an annotated bibliography. Sadly, such is not the style of the 'Dummies' series. I'd happily pay extra for that because it would save me wearing out the binding looking back for things all the time. Sadly too, there aren't NEARLY enough Rich Tarrant cartoons here to satisfy: when you're knee deep in alien space monsters or gangland retribution, a little graphic levity can help! Because the author's three prior works were so steeped in Masonic 'stuff', I was expecting to simply skip over the Masonic section as 'old hat'. What a mistake that would have been. Somehow this book has managed to circumvent the 'old wine - new bottle' conundrum and has included a fresh and relevant approach coinciding with the book's title. They've got what essentially could be called the 'elevator pitch' on Freemasonry with explanations that are simple and understandable - and something any Mason could use when asked that question "What is Freemasonry?" that brings even long-term members to the point of stuttering.I did have a couple of small quibbles. One was the mention of a meeting between two 18th century conspiracists, John Robison and Abbe Barruel. My prior reading indicated that this had never occurred but they simply acknowledged (belatedly) the work done by the other (and, in fact, Barruel was quite dismissive of Robison's work. Vernon Stauffer's seminal work on this topic provides a quote in support of this. It's a bit of minutiae we can arm wrestle over elsewhere and it does not in any way lessen the assumptions, conclusions or assessments which cover FAR more ground more accurately and intelligently than any other work on this topic. The other quibble involved the loss by the town of Roswell, New Mexico of some 5,000 souls between the start of a paragraph and the end. Then again, who knows: maybe it was a conspiracy!Like the Hodapp family predecessors, this is a book with an easy to read style and it's one you can consume in small pieces at your leisure. I'll bet, though, that like me you'll devour it within a few pleasant hours and set it down having learned a bunch of things about events and organizations you thought you had thoroughly understood prior to that. If you're looking to debunk things like the origins of the Rosicrucians or your friend who's convinced he has all the facts about 9/11, then this is the book for you. Of course, if you think that David Icke is the true messiah or that Coast to Coast is more factual than National Public Radio, you won't enjoy it AT ALL! Move along: there's nothing to see here….